Fúg Báis

Publication Instance Details #1899

Publication Overview

Translation	Is Multilingual	Explicit Irish Context?	Ekphrasis	Has Paratext?	Reference to News, Media or Technology
Yes	No	No	No	No	No

Details

Human Rights Issues	Genocide Racism/anti-Semitism/Sectarianism
War / Genocide Referenced	Genocide: Holocaust
Languages	Irish
Original Language	German
Original Poem	Todesfuge
Original Author	Paul Antschel
Genre	Short Lyric
Medium	Print Collection
Notes	This poem is one of the most famous and anthologized poems about the Holocaust. The speaker of the poem puts his disjointed thoughts across in a 'stream-of-consciousness' format, speaking about the pain and brutality of the life in the concentration camps during the Holocaust. The 'fugue' format is a musical composition in which two or more voices are heard simultaneously in verse, and in which the subject of the theme is repeated in the work. This may account for the repeated 'bainne dubh ghealadh an lae' = 'the black milk of dawn', amongst other lines, which are repeated frequently in the poem and draw attention to the disjointed thoughts and suffering of the speaker of the poem. There are several characters in the poem, notably the camp guard or commandant, who writes home to Margarete, and the character Sulamith, a Jewish prisoner who appears to have died in the camp. The repeated refrains highlight the sense of desperation and suffering of the Jewish people during the Holocaust.